Early life

Richard Phillips Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in New York City,[6][7] the son of Lucille (née Phillips), a homemaker, and Melville Arthur Feynman, a sales manager.[8] His family originated from Russia and Poland; both of his parents were Ashkenazi Jews.[9] They were not religious, and by his youth Feynman described himself as an "avowed atheist".[10]

Feynman was a late talker, and by his third birthday had yet to utter a single word. He would retain a Bronx accent as an adult.[11][12] That accent was thick enough to be perceived as an affectation or exaggeration[13][14] — so much so that his good friends Wolfgang Pauli and Hans Bethe would one day comment that Feynman spoke like a "bum".[13]

The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father, who
encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking, and who
was always ready to teach Feynman something new. From his mother he
gained the sense of humor that he had throughout his life. As a child,
he had a talent for engineering,
maintained an experimental laboratory in his home, and delighted in
repairing radios. When he was in grade school, he created a home burglar
alarm system while his parents were out for the day running errands.[15]

When Richard was five years old, his mother gave birth to a younger
brother, but this brother died at four weeks of age. Four years later,
Richard gained a sister, Joan, and the family moved to Far Rockaway, Queens.[8]
Though separated by nine years, Joan and Richard were close, as they
both shared a natural curiosity about the world. Their mother thought
that women did not have the cranial capacity to comprehend such things.
Despite their mother's disapproval of Joan's desire to study astronomy,
Richard encouraged his sister to explore the universe. Joan eventually
became an astrophysicist specializing in interactions between the Earth
and the solar wind.[16]

His habit of direct characterization sometimes rattled more
conventional thinkers; for example, one of his questions, when learning feline anatomy, was "Do you have a map of the cat?" (referring to an anatomical chart).[19]

This was Richard Feynman nearing the crest of his powers. At
twenty-three … there was no physicist on earth who could match his
exuberant command over the native materials of theoretical science. It
was not just a facility at mathematics (though it had become clear …
that the mathematical machinery emerging from the Wheeler–Feynman
collaboration was beyond Wheeler's own ability). Feynman seemed to
possess a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations, like
Albert Einstein at the same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau—but few others.

He immersed himself in work on the project, and was present at the Trinity
bomb test. Feynman claimed to be the only person to see the explosion
without the very dark glasses or welder's lenses provided, reasoning
that it was safe to look through a truck windshield, as it would screen
out the harmful ultraviolet
radiation. On witnessing the blast, Feynman ducked towards the floor of
his truck because of the immense brightness of the explosion, where he
saw a temporary "purple splotch" afterimage of the event.[24]

Feynman's other work at Los Alamos included calculating neutron equations for the Los Alamos "Water Boiler", a small nuclear reactor, to measure how close an assembly of fissile material was to criticality. On completing this work he was transferred to the Oak Ridge facility, where he aided engineers in devising safety procedures for material storage so that criticality accidents
(for example, due to sub-critical amounts of fissile material
inadvertently stored in proximity on opposite sides of a wall) could be
avoided. He also did theoretical work and calculations on the proposed uranium hydride bomb, which later proved not to be feasible.

Feynman was sought out by physicist Niels Bohr
for one-on-one discussions. He later discovered the reason: most of the
other physicists were too much in awe of Bohr to argue with him.
Feynman had no such inhibitions, vigorously pointing out anything he
considered to be flawed in Bohr's thinking. Feynman said he felt as much
respect for Bohr as anyone else, but once anyone got him talking about
physics, he would become so focused he forgot about social niceties.

Due to the top secret nature of the work, Los Alamos was isolated. In Feynman's own words, "There wasn't anything to do
there". Bored, he indulged his curiosity by learning to pick the
combination locks on cabinets and desks used to secure papers. Feynman
played many jokes on colleagues. In one case he found the combination to
a locked filing cabinet by trying the numbers he thought a physicist
would use (it proved to be 27–18–28 after the base of natural logarithms, e
= 2.71828…), and found that the three filing cabinets where a colleague
kept a set of atomic bomb research notes all had the same combination.[25] He left a series of notes in the cabinets as a prank, which initially spooked his colleague, Frederic de Hoffmann,
into thinking a spy or saboteur had gained access to atomic bomb
secrets. On several occasions, Feynman drove to Albuquerque to see his
ailing wife in a car borrowed from Klaus Fuchs, who was later discovered to be a real spy for the Soviets, transporting nuclear secrets in his car to Santa Fe.

On occasion, Feynman would find an isolated section of the mesa where he could drum in the style of American natives;
"and maybe I would dance and chant, a little". These antics did not go
unnoticed, and rumors spread about a mysterious Indian drummer called
"Injun Joe". He also became a friend of the laboratory head, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who unsuccessfully tried to court him away from his other commitments after the war to work at the University of California, Berkeley.

Feynman alludes to his thoughts on the justification for getting involved in the Manhattan project in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.
He felt the possibility of Nazi Germany developing the bomb before the
Allies was a compelling reason to help with its development for the U.S.
He goes on to say, however, that it was an error on his part not to
reconsider the situation once Germany was defeated. In the same
publication, Feynman also talks about his worries in the atomic bomb
age, feeling for some considerable time that there was a high risk that
the bomb would be used again soon, so that it was pointless to build for
the future. Later he describes this period as a "depression."

Early academic career

Following the completion of his Ph.D. in 1942, Feynman held an appointment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
as an assistant professor of physics. The appointment was spent on
leave for his involvement in the Manhattan project. In 1945, he received
a letter from Dean Mark Ingraham of the College of Letters and Science
requesting his return to UW to teach in the coming academic year. His
appointment was not extended when he did not commit to return. In a talk
given several years later at UW, Feynman quipped, "It's great to be back at the only university that ever had the good sense to fire me".[26]

After the war, Feynman declined an offer from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, despite the presence there of such distinguished faculty members as Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel and John von Neumann. Feynman followed Hans Bethe, instead, to Cornell University, where Feynman taught theoretical physics from 1945 to 1950. During a temporary depression following the destruction of Hiroshima
by the bomb produced by the Manhattan Project, he focused on complex
physics problems, not for utility, but for self-satisfaction. One of
these was analyzing the physics of a twirling, nutating
dish as it is moving through the air. His work during this period,
which used equations of rotation to express various spinning speeds,
proved important to his Nobel Prize-winning work, yet because he felt
burned out and had turned his attention to less immediately practical
problems, he was surprised by the offers of professorships from other
renowned universities.

Despite yet another offer from the Institute for Advanced Study,
Feynman rejected the Institute on the grounds that there were no
teaching duties: Feynman felt that students were a source of inspiration
and teaching was a diversion during uncreative spells. Because of this,
the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University jointly
offered him a package whereby he could teach at the university and also
be at the institute.[citation needed] Feynman instead accepted an offer from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)—and as he says in his book Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!—because
a desire to live in a mild climate had firmly fixed itself in his mind
while he was installing tire chains on his car in the middle of a
snowstorm in Ithaca.

Feynman has been called the "Great Explainer".[27]
He gained a reputation for taking great care when giving explanations
to his students and for making it a moral duty to make the topic
accessible. His guiding principle was that, if a topic could not be
explained in a freshman lecture, it was not yet fully understood. Feynman gained great pleasure [28] from coming up with such a "freshman-level" explanation, for example, of the connection between spin and statistics. What he said was that groups of particles with spin ½ "repel", whereas groups with integer spin "clump." This was a brilliantly simplified way of demonstrating how Fermi–Dirac statistics and Bose–Einstein statistics evolved as a consequence of studying how fermions and bosons
behave under a rotation of 360°. This was also a question he pondered
in his more advanced lectures, and to which he demonstrated the solution
in the 1986 Dirac memorial lecture.[29]
In the same lecture, he further explained that antiparticles must
exist, for if particles had only positive energies, they would not be
restricted to a so-called "light cone."

He opposed rote learning or unthinking memorization and other teaching methods that emphasized form over function. Clear thinking and clear presentation
were fundamental prerequisites for his attention. It could be perilous
even to approach him when unprepared, and he did not forget the fools or
pretenders.[30]

Caltech years

Quantum electrodynamics. The theory for which Feynman won his Nobel Prize is known for its accurate predictions.[31]
This theory was begun in the earlier years during Feynman's work at
Princeton as a graduate student and continued while he was at Cornell.
This work consisted of two distinct formulations, and it is a common
error to confuse them or to merge them into one. The first is his path integral formulation
(actually, Feynman couldn't formulate QED as a Feynman Integral since
that involves super-Feynman Integrals which were developed by others in
the 50's), and the second is the formulation of his Feynman diagrams. Both formulations contained his sum over histories method in which every possible path from one state to the next is considered, the final path being a sum over the possibilities (also referred to as sum-over-paths).[32]
For a number of years he lectured to students at Caltech on his path
integral formulation of quantum theory. The second formulation of
quantum electrodynamics (using Feynman diagrams) was specifically
mentioned by the Nobel committee. The logical connection with the path
integral formulation is interesting. Feynman did not prove that the
rules for his diagrams followed mathematically from the path integral
formulation. Some special cases were later proved by other people, but
only in the real case, so the proofs don't work when spin is involved.
The second formulation should be thought of as starting anew, but guided
by the intuitive insight provided by the first formulation. Freeman Dyson published a paper in 1949 which, among many other things, added new rules to Feynman's which told how to actually implement renormalization.
Students everywhere learned and used the powerful new tool that Feynman
had created. Eventually computer programs were written to compute
Feynman diagrams, providing a tool of unprecedented power. It is
possible to write such programs because the Feynman diagrams constitute a
formal language with a grammar. Marc Kac provided the formal proofs of the summation under history, showing that the parabolic partial differential equation can be reexpressed as a sum under different histories (that is, an expectation operator), what is now known as the Feynman-Kac formula, the use of which extends beyond physics to many applications of stochastic processes.[33]

He also developed Feynman diagrams, a bookkeeping device which helps in conceptualizing and calculating interactions between particles in spacetime, notably the interactions between electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons.
This device allowed him, and later others, to approach time
reversibility and other fundamental processes. Feynman's mental picture
for these diagrams started with the hard sphere approximation, and the interactions could be thought of as collisions
at first. It was not until decades later that physicists thought of
analyzing the nodes of the Feynman diagrams more closely. Feynman
famously painted Feynman diagrams on the exterior of his van.[36][37]

From his diagrams of a small number of particles interacting in spacetime, Feynman could then model all of physics in terms of the spins of those particles and the range of coupling of the fundamental forces.[38] Feynman attempted an explanation of the strong interactions governing nucleons scattering called the parton model. The parton model emerged as a complement to the quark model developed by his Caltech colleague Murray Gell-Mann.
The relationship between the two models was murky; Gell-Mann referred
to Feynman's partons derisively as "put-ons". In the mid-1960s,
physicists believed that quarks were just a bookkeeping device for
symmetry numbers, not real particles, as the statistics of the Omega-minus particle,
if it were interpreted as three identical strange quarks bound
together, seemed impossible if quarks were real. The Stanford linear
accelerator deep inelastic scattering experiments of the late 1960s showed, analogously to Ernest Rutherford's experiment of scattering alpha particles on gold nuclei in 1911, that nucleons
(protons and neutrons) contained point-like particles which scattered
electrons. It was natural to identify these with quarks, but Feynman's
parton model attempted to interpret the experimental data in a way which
did not introduce additional hypotheses. For example, the data showed
that some 45% of the energy momentum was carried by electrically-neutral
particles in the nucleon. These electrically-neutral particles are now
seen to be the gluons
which carry the forces between the quarks and carry also the
three-valued color quantum number which solves the Omega-minus problem.
Feynman did not dispute the quark model; for example, when the fifth
quark was discovered in 1977, Feynman immediately pointed out to his
students that the discovery implied the existence of a sixth quark,
which was duly discovered in the decade after his death.

After the success of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman turned to quantum gravity.
By analogy with the photon, which has spin 1, he investigated the
consequences of a free massless spin 2 field, and derived the Einstein field equation of general relativity, but little more.[39]
However, the computational device that Feynman discovered then for
gravity, "ghosts", which are "particles" in the interior of his diagrams
which have the "wrong" connection between spin and statistics, have
proved invaluable in explaining the quantum particle behavior of the Yang–Mills theories, for example, QCD and the electro-weak theory.

In 1965, Feynman was appointed a foreign member of the Royal Society.[6][40]
At this time in the early 1960s, Feynman exhausted himself by working
on multiple major projects at the same time, including a request, while
at Caltech, to "spruce up" the teaching of undergraduates. After three
years devoted to the task, he produced a series of lectures that
eventually became The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
He wanted a picture of a drumhead sprinkled with powder to show the
modes of vibration at the beginning of the book. Concerned over the
connections to drugs and rock and roll that could be made from the
image, the publishers changed the cover to plain red, though they
included a picture of him playing drums in the foreword. The Feynman Lectures on Physics[41] occupied two physicists, Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands,
as part-time co-authors for several years. Even though the books were
not adopted by most universities as textbooks, they continue to sell
well because they provide a deep understanding of physics. As of 2005, The Feynman Lectures on Physics
has sold over 1.5 million copies in English, an estimated 1 million
copies in Russian, and an estimated half million copies in other
languages.[citation needed] Many of his lectures and miscellaneous talks were turned into other books, including The Character of Physical Law, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Statistical Mechanics, Lectures on Gravitation, and the Feynman Lectures on Computation.

Feynman's students competed keenly for his attention; he was once
awakened when a student solved a problem and dropped it in his mailbox;
glimpsing the student sneaking across his lawn, he could not go back to
sleep, and he read the student's solution. The next morning his
breakfast was interrupted by another triumphant student, but Feynman
informed him that he was too late.

Partly as a way to bring publicity to progress in physics, Feynman
offered $1,000 prizes for two of his challenges in nanotechnology; one
was claimed by William McLellan and the other by Tom Newman.[42] He was also one of the first scientists to conceive the possibility of quantum computers.

In 1974, Feynman delivered the Caltech commencement address on the topic of cargo cult science, which has the semblance of science, but is only pseudoscience
due to a lack of "a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of
scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty" on the
part of the scientist. He instructed the graduating class that "The
first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the
easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After
you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You
just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."[43]

In 1984–86, he developed a variational method for the approximate
calculation of path integrals which has led to a powerful method of
converting divergent perturbation expansions into convergent
strong-coupling expansions (variational perturbation theory) and, as a consequence, to the most accurate determination[44] of critical exponents measured in satellite experiments.[45]

In the late 1980s, according to "Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine", Feynman played a crucial role in developing the first massively parallel computer, and in finding innovative uses for it in numerical computations, in building neural networks, as well as physical simulations using cellular automata (such as turbulent fluid flow), working with Stephen Wolfram at Caltech.[46]
His son Carl also played a role in the development of the original
Connection Machine engineering; Feynman influencing the interconnects
while his son worked on the software.

Feynman diagrams are now fundamental for string theory and M-theory, and have even been extended topologically.[47] The world-lines of the diagrams have developed to become tubes to allow better modeling of more complicated objects such as strings and membranes.
Shortly before his death, Feynman criticized string theory in an
interview: "I don't like that they're not calculating anything," he
said. "I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that
for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an
explanation—a fix-up to say, ‘Well, it still might be true.'" These
words have since been much-quoted by opponents of the string-theoretic
direction for particle physics.[34]

Challenger disaster

Feynman played an important role on the Presidential Rogers Commission, which investigated the Challenger disaster. During a televised hearing, Feynman demonstrated that the material used in the shuttle's O-rings became less resilient in cold weather by compressing a sample of the material in a clamp and immersing it in ice-cold water.[48]
The commission ultimately determined that the disaster was caused by
the primary O-ring not properly sealing in unusually cold weather at Cape Canaveral.[49]

Feynman devoted the latter half of his book What Do You Care What Other People Think?
to his experience on the Rogers Commission, straying from his usual
convention of brief, light-hearted anecdotes to deliver an extended and
sober narrative. Feynman's account reveals a disconnect between NASA's
engineers and executives that was far more striking than he expected.
His interviews of NASA's high-ranking managers revealed startling
misunderstandings of elementary concepts. For instance, NASA managers
claimed that there was a 1 in 100,000 chance of a catastrophic failure
aboard the shuttle, but Feynman discovered that NASA's own engineers
estimated the chance of a catastrophe at closer to 1 in 200. He
concluded that the space shuttle reliability estimate by NASA management
was fantastically unrealistic, and he was particularly angered that
NASA used these figures to recruit Christa McAuliffe
into the Teacher-in-Space program. He warned in his appendix to the
commission's report (which was included only after he threatened not to
sign the report), "For a successful technology, reality must take
precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."[50]

A television documentary drama named The Challenger (US title: The Challenger Disaster), detailing Feynman's part in the investigation, was aired in 2013.[51]

Cultural identification

Although born to and raised by parents who were Ashkenazi, Feynman was not only an atheist,[52]
but declined to be labelled Jewish. He routinely refused to be included
in lists or books that classified people by race. He asked to not be
included in Tina Levitan's The Laureates: Jewish Winners of the Nobel Prize,
writing, "To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come
from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of
nonsense on racial theory," and adding "...at thirteen I was not only
converted to other religious views, but I also stopped believing that
the Jewish people are in any way 'the chosen people'".[53]

Personal life

While researching for his Ph.D., Feynman married his first wife, Arline Greenbaum (often misspelled Arlene). They married knowing that Arline was seriously ill from tuberculosis, of which she died in 1945. In 1946, Feynman wrote a letter to her, but kept it sealed for the rest of his life.[54] This portion of Feynman's life was portrayed in the 1996 film Infinity, which featured Feynman's daughter, Michelle, in a cameo role.

He married a second time in June 1952, to Mary Louise Bell of Neodesha, Kansas; this marriage was unsuccessful:

He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he
awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the
living room, and while lying in bed at night.

He later married Gweneth Howarth (1934–1989) from Ripponden, Yorkshire, who shared his enthusiasm for life and spirited adventure.[36] Besides their home in Altadena, California, they had a beach house in Baja California,
purchased with the prize money from Feynman's Nobel Prize, his one
third share of $55,000. They remained married until Feynman's death.
They had a son, Carl, in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in
1968.[36]

Feynman had a great deal of success teaching Carl, using, for example, discussions about ants and Martians
as a device for gaining perspective on problems and issues. He was
surprised to learn that the same teaching devices were not useful with
Michelle.[37]
Mathematics was a common interest for father and son; they both entered
the computer field as consultants and were involved in advancing a new
method of using multiple computers to solve complex problems—later known
as parallel computing. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory retained Feynman as a computational consultant during critical missions. One co-worker characterized Feynman as akin to Don Quixote at his desk, rather than at a computer workstation, ready to do battle with the windmills.

Feynman traveled widely, notably to Brazil, where he gave courses at
the CBPF (Brazilian Center for Physics Research) and near the end of his
life schemed to visit the Russian land of Tuva, a dream that, because of Cold War bureaucratic problems, never became reality.[55]
The day after he died, a letter arrived for him from the Soviet
government, giving him authorization to travel to Tuva. Out of his
enthusiastic interest in reaching Tuva came the phrase "Tuva or Bust"
(also the title of a book about his efforts to get there), which was
tossed about frequently amongst his circle of friends in hope that they,
one day, could see it firsthand. The documentary movie, Genghis Blues, mentions some of his attempts to communicate with Tuva and chronicles the successful journey there by his friends.

Responding to Hubert Humphrey's congratulation for his Nobel Prize, Feynman admitted to a long admiration for the then vice president.[56] In a letter to an MIT professor dated December 6, 1966, Feynman expressed interest in running for governor of California.[57]

Feynman took up drawing at one time and enjoyed some success under
the pseudonym "Ofey", culminating in an exhibition of his work. He
learned to play a metal percussion instrument (frigideira) in a samba style in Brazil, and participated in a samba school.

In addition, he had some degree of synesthesia
for equations, explaining that the letters in certain mathematical
functions appeared in color for him, even though invariably printed in
standard black-and-white.[58]

According to Genius, the James Gleick-authored biography, Feynman tried LSD during his professorship at Caltech.[34]
Somewhat embarrassed by his actions, he largely sidestepped the issue
when dictating his anecdotes; he mentions it in passing in the "O
Americano, Outra Vez" section, while the "Altered States" chapter in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! describes only marijuana and ketamine experiences at John Lilly's famed sensory deprivation tanks, as a way of studying consciousness.[25]
Feynman gave up alcohol when he began to show vague, early signs of
alcoholism, as he did not want to do anything that could damage his
brain—the same reason given in "O Americano, Outra Vez" for his
reluctance to experiment with LSD.[25]

In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he gives advice on the
best way to pick up a girl in a hostess bar. At Caltech, he used a nude
or topless bar as an office away from his usual office, making sketches
or writing physics equations on paper placemats. When the county
officials tried to close the place, all visitors except Feynman refused
to testify in favor of the bar, fearing that their families or patrons
would learn about their visits. Only Feynman accepted, and in court, he
affirmed that the bar was a public need, stating that craftsmen,
technicians, engineers, common workers, "and a physics professor"
frequented the establishment. While the bar lost the court case, it was
allowed to remain open as a similar case was pending appeal.[25]

Feynman has a minor acting role in the film Anti-Clock credited as "The Professor".[59]

Popular legacy

Actor Alan Alda
commissioned playwright Peter Parnell to write a two-character play
about a fictional day in the life of Feynman set two years before
Feynman's death. The play, QED, which was based on writings about Richard Feynman's life during the 1990s, premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, California in 2001. The play was then presented at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on Broadway, with both presentations starring Alda as Richard Feynman.[61]

On the twentieth anniversary of Feynman's death, composer Edward Manukyan dedicated a piece for solo clarinet to his memory.[66] It was premiered by Doug Storey, the principal clarinetist of the Amarillo Symphony.

Between 2009 and 2011, clips of an interview with Feynman were used by composer John Boswell as part of the Symphony of Science
project in the second, fifth, seventh, and eleventh installments of his
videos, "We Are All Connected", "The Poetry of Reality", "A Wave of
Reason", and "The Quantum World".[67]

In a 1992 New York Times article on Feynman and his legacy, James Gleick recounts the story of how Murray Gell-Mann
described what has become known as "The Feynman Algorithm" or "The
Feynman Problem-Solving Algorithm" to a student: "The student asks
Gell-Mann about Feynman's notes. Gell-Mann says no, Dick's methods are
not the same as the methods used here. The student asks, well, what are
Feynman's methods? Gell-Mann leans coyly against the blackboard and
says: Dick's method is this. You write down the problem. You think very
hard. (He shuts his eyes and presses his knuckles parodically to his
forehead.) Then you write down the answer." [68]

In 1998, a photograph of Richard Feynman giving a lecture was part of the poster series commissioned by Apple Inc. for their "Think Different" advertising campaign.[69]

Textbooks and lecture notes

The Feynman Lectures on Physics is perhaps his most accessible work for anyone with an interest in physics, compiled from lectures to Caltech
undergraduates in 1961–64. As news of the lectures' lucidity grew, a
number of professional physicists and graduate students began to drop in
to listen. Co-authors Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands,
colleagues of Feynman, edited and illustrated them into book form. The
work has endured and is useful to this day. They were edited and
supplemented in 2005 with "Feynman's Tips on Physics: A Problem-Solving
Supplement to the Feynman Lectures on Physics" by Michael Gottlieb and Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton's son), with support from Kip Thorne and other physicists.

Feynman, Richard P.; Leighton, Robert B.; Sands, Matthew (1970). The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Definitive and Extended Edition. 3 volumes (2nd ed.). Addison Wesley (published 2005, originally published as separate volumes in 1964 and 1966). ISBN0-8053-9045-6.Check date values in: |publicationdate= (help) Includes Feynman's Tips on Physics
(with Michael Gottlieb and Ralph Leighton), which includes four
previously unreleased lectures on problem solving, exercises by Robert
Leighton and Rochus Vogt, and a historical essay by Matthew Sands.

Audio and video recordings

Los Alamos From Below (audio, talk given by Feynman at Santa Barbara on February 6, 1975)

Six Easy Pieces (original lectures upon which the book is based)

Six Not So Easy Pieces (original lectures upon which the book is based)

The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Complete Audio Collection

Samples of Feynman's drumming, chanting and speech are included in
the songs "Tuva Groove (Bolur Daa-Bol, Bolbas Daa-Bol)" and "Kargyraa
Rap (Dürgen Chugaa)" on the album Back Tuva Future, The Adventure Continues by Kongar-ool Ondar. The hidden track on this album also includes excerpts from lectures without musical background.

About Me

My formal training is in chemistry. I also read a great deal of physics and biology. In fact I very much enjoy reading in general, mostly science, but also some fiction and history. I also enjoy computer programming and writing. I like hiking and exploring nature. I also enjoy people; not too much in social settings, but one on one; also, people with interesting or "off-beat" minds draw me to them. I also have some interest in Buddhism.

These days I get a lot more information from the internet, primarily through Wiki. Some television, e. g., documentaries, PBS shows like "Nova" and "Nature".

My favorite science writers are Jacob Bronowski ("The Ascent of Man") and Richard Dawkins (his "The Blind Watchmaker" is right up there up Ascent). I also have a favorite writer on Buddhism, Pema Chodron. Favorite films are "Annie Hall" (by Woody Allen), "The Maltese Falcon", "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", "As Good As It Gets", "Conspiracy Theory", Monty Python's "Search For The Holy Grail" and "Life of Brian", and a few others which I can't think about at the moment.

I love a number of classical works (Beethoven's "Pastoral", "Afternoon Of A Fawn" and "Clair De Lune" by Debussey , Pachelbel's "Canon" come to mind. My favorite piece is probably Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue". But I also enjoy a great deal in modern music, including many jazz pieces, folk songs by people like Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, a hodgepodge of pieces by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Niel Young, and practically everything the Beatles wrote.

My life over the last few years has been in some disarray, but I am finally "getting it together.". As I am very much into the sciences and writing, I would like to move more in this direction. I also enjoy teaching. As for my political leanings, most people would probably describe as basically liberal, though not extremely so. My religious leanings are to the absolutely none: I've alluded to my interest in Buddhism, but again this is not any supernatural or scientifically untested aspect of it but in the way it provides a powerful philosophy and set of practical, day to day methods of dealing with myself and the other human beings.